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La Scala conductor outburst at fan’s photos

Conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim has become the latest artist to interrupt a concert to tick off the audience for taking photographs, slamming flash-happy fans at Milan's prestigious opera house as "badly educated".

Published: 23 December 2014 15:00 CET

La Scala conductor outburst at fan's photos

"Those who take photographs during concerts are badly educated," said conductor Daniel Barenboim. Photo: Dieter Nagl/AFP

The outburst, which came during a performance of Schubert at La Scala, was compared to pianist Keith Jarrett's notorious on-stage rant at the Umbria Jazz festival, when he told "all these assholes with cameras" to "turn them fucking off right now".

Barenboim was more restrained, but warned the audience – and one woman in particular – that he had asked several times for people not to take photographs during his performance and was beginning to lose his temper.

"Madam, I am trying to give you my best, but you have no respect for it!" he said. "Those who take photographs during concerts are badly educated.

"I have asked at every concert. The first time nicely, but now it's serious," he said, before returning to the stage to begin the sonata again, according to the media reports.

Jarrett was banned for six years from the Umbria festival in Perugia after his 2007 outburst, returning to perform in 2013 but – to the audience's bemusement – playing in the dark, so that no one could take photographs.

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New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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